A broken heart & a moment of drunken bravado inspires middle-aged, & typically rather cautious, journalist Mike Carter to take off on a life-changing six month motorcycle trip around Europe. Never mind that he hadn`t been on two wheels since an inglorious three-month teenage chapter involving a Lambretta, four crashes & an 18-month ban for drink-driving, a plan had begun to loosely form... And so, having completed a six day residential motorcycle course & hastily re-mortgaged his flat, Mike sets off alone, resolving to go wherever the road takes him & enjoy the adventure of heading off into the unknown. He ends up travelling almost 20, 000 miles & reaching the four extremes of Europe: the Arctic Circle in the north, the Mediterranean coast in the south, the Portuguese Atlantic to the west & the Iraqi border of Turkey in the east. But really it`s a journey inwards, as, on the way, Mike finds his post-divorce scars starting to heal & attempts to discover what he, as a man in his forties who hasn`t quite found his place in the world, should be doing. Self-deprecating, poetic & utterly engaging, his is a heroic journey taken for the rest of us too scared to leave our 9 to 5 office-bound existence.